Modernity In The Flesh

This book examines the lives of people caught in the dynamics of changing mores, rapid urbanization, and real public health issues in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires. Modernity in the Flesh shows the costs Argentines paid for the establishment of liberal democracy between 1880 and 1910. Modernity raised consciousness of the public good and a commitment to new sciences and a new set of priorities that asserted the precedence of health and security of the social whole. This book shows the ways that the tensions of liberal democracy between individual rights and the social good were tempered by "flesh" and articulated through this word. As the state was pursuing positivist science and government, the flesh held out a type of corrective to the focus on scientific and material progress.

BODIES OF MODERNITY explores the ways in which men's and women's bodies were represented in late 19th-century France. A series of case studies looks at well-known works by Cezanne, Renoir, and Seurat with new interpretation, while lesser-known works are considered seriously for the first time. 140 illustrations, 14 in color.

These two essays touch on many problems and hindrances that prevent us from becoming mature human beings in the modern world. During the course of these works, solutions are offered and hindrances are creatively overcome.

What should Christian discourse look like after philosophical modernity? In one manner or another the essays in this volume seek to confront and intellectually exorcise the prevailing elements of philosophical modernity, which are inherently transgressive disfigurations and refigurations of the Christian story of creation, sin, and redemption. To enact these various forms and styles of Christian intellectual exorcism the essays in this volume make appeal to, and converse with, the magisterial corpus of Cyril O’Regan. The themes of the essays center around the gnostic return in modernity, apocalyptic theology, and the question of the bounds and borders of Christian orthodoxy. Along the way diverse figures are treated such as: Hegel, Shakespeare, von Balthasar, Przywara, Ricouer, Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, and Kristeva. Exorcising Philosophical Modernity: Cyril O’Regan and Christian Discourse after Modernity is a veritable feast of post-modern Christian thought.

Michael Weinstein redefines the debates over modernism/postmodernism that dominate contemporary cultural studies, offering a daring and original alternative. He argues that the current era is neither a continuation of modernity nor a postmodern rupture, but a period of 'post-civilized modernity.'

This in-depth collection of essays traces the changing reception of Shakespeare over the past four hundred years, during which time Shakespeare has variously been seen as the last great exponent of pre-modern Western culture, a crucial inaugurator of modernity, and a prophet of postmodernity. This fresh look at Shakespeare's plays is an important contribution to the revival of the idea of 'modernity' and how we periodise ourselves, and Shakespeare, at the beginning of a new millennium.

Thought to be unequivocally different from one another, modern men and women were expected to express their sexuality and social positions in the clothes they wore, the poses they struck, and the behavior they exhibited. In a series of case studies, Bodies of Modernity looks at works by Cezanne, Renoir, Seurat, Tissot, and Caillebotte as well as photographs of male body builders to establish an image of the modern body. Well-known works such as Renoir's Nude in the Sunlight, Seurat's Young Woman Powdering Herself, and Cezanne's Large Bathers are given new interpretations, while lesser known paintings like Tissot's series on The Women of Paris or Caillebotte's iconoclastic Man at the Bath are looked at seriously for the first time.Bodies of Modernity is an original account of one of the best-loved periods in Western art history. By taking "figure and flesh" as its focus, it bypasses traditional art historical categories and style labels to provide a reading of the work of the Impressionists and their contemporaries that gets to the heart of French society of the period.

"That science-fiction future in which technology would make everything very good—or very bad—has not yet arrived. From our vantage point at least, no age appears to have had a deeper faith in the inevitability and imminence of such a total technological transformation than the early twentieth century. Russia was no exception."—from the introduction In the Soviet Union, it seems, armoring oneself against the world did not suffice—it was best to become metal itself. In his engaging and accessible book, Rolf Hellebust explores the aesthetic and ideological function of the metallization of the revolutionary body as revealed in Soviet literature, art, and politics. His book shows how the significance of this modern myth goes far beyond the immediate issue of the enthusiasm with which the Bolsheviks welcomed such a symbolic transfiguration and that of our own uneasy attraction to the images of metal flesh and machine-men. Hellebust's literary examples range from the famous (Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago) to the forgotten (early Soviet proletarian poets). To these he adds a mix of non-Russian references, from creation myths to comic book superheroes, medieval alchemy to Moby-Dick. He includes readings of posters, sculpture, and political discourse as well as cross-cultural comparisons to revolutionary France, industrial-age America, and Nazi Germany. The result is a fascinating portrait of the ultimate symbols of dehumanizing modernity, as refracted through the prism of utopian humanism.